Steam Next Fest October 2025: GANGSTALKED by Demos
There's so many of us there's so many of us there's so many
WE NEED THE SPACE (for more demos)
It’s time for another Steam Next Fest, where thousands of indie games fight for their fifteen seconds of notoriety, hoping to get put on wishlists. There’s an overwhelming amount of demos on offer. Some good, some okay and a lot of bad ones. I played a few, and now I’m here to tell you if any of them are worth a shot.
The Good
SWAPMEAT
SWAPMEAT is a third person shooter where you can switch your body parts with enemies. No not like that. When enemies are killed, they have a chance to drop a piece of themselves, which you can pick up, granting you new abilities and making you look like a complete, mismatched freak. You can pick up bug legs that let you climb up surfaces, a raw turkey head that launches flaming turkey bombs or swap out your torso for a giant bullet and get infinite ammo every few seconds. This mix-and-match system is fun to explore, giving you a lot of options and skills to play around with. There’s a good variety, too, which will be reduced down to one combination once the reddit metaslaves get to it.
The game takes place in large, open maps with multiple objectives, similar to Helldivers 2. The objectives themselves aren’t too exciting. They usually involve going to one spot and shooting down eggs, or shooting down some slime piles. Later on there’s a boss fight. I hope there are a few more mission types in the full game.
What’s in the demo is interesting, and holds promise. The controls feel smooth and responsive, the abilities you get from body parts are fun, and it’s an alright time. The core gameplay is solid.
The extra elements need some tweaks. This has some roguelite elements, so expect to pick one of three every few minutes. These upgrades you get from leveling up aren’t particularly unique or interesting. A lot of them are just about getting more numbers. More health, more damage, more damage on critical hits, etc. That sort of thing. Not very interesting. There’s also some meta-progression that stays between runs, things like weapon levels and upgrades, but I didn’t see much of that aspect.
The presentation is also very uneven. The graphics are good, with the enemy designs being a highlight. They’re really weird and fleshy in a 50s monster movie kind of way. You get giant bugs, tentacles and brains in jars. The music isn’t great. A lot of it sounds like royalty-free background music. Nothing too interesting or catchy. The soundscape in general is off. It’s very empty, with just the music and some stray sound effects here and there. The UI is also very rough. Maybe these are pre-launch wrinkles that will be ironed out at some point. I hope so.
With all that said, I still recommend giving SWAPMEAT a shot. It’s a fun time with some unique ideas. It also has multiplayer, so you can get some friends together and play with your meats.
Bubsy 4D
Somehow, Bubsy returned. Who’s keeping this guy alive? Is the power of millennial irony that strong? His first games were bad, then came Bubsy 3D, which was so bad it became his claim to fame, then they rebooted him for irony’s sake in 2017, and now it’s 2025 and he’s back. I guess he really does have nine lives.
With a track record like that, I wouldn’t expect this to be any good, but to my surprise, it’s actually decent. It’s a 3D platformer with big levels where your goal is to get to the end while getting optional collectibles. You can run, jump and glide and pounce, as always. Bubsy, being the cat burglar that he is, went and stole some of Mario’s moves, too, so now he can spin jump, triple jump, wall jump and do a backflip for extra height. All these jumps can be combined in different ways to give you a surprising amount of mobility and agility. You can jump really far and do some neat tricks, and it all feels smooth and intuitive.
The levels you get in the demo are pretty good. They’re surrealist platforming challenges that make no spatial sense, but are fun to run around in. They’re made of arts and crafts materials like buttons, yarn and wood, which reminded me a lot of the secret stages in Super Mario Sunshine. The game in general seems to take more than a little bit of inspiration from Sunshine, with how it plays, which is never a bad thing.
Rounding out Bubsy’s move set is his ability to turn into a ball and roll around at high speeds like Sonic, showing he has zero shame when it comes to lifting ideas from better games. Its inclusion in the game is just what he needed. The first Bubsy platformers were horrendous rip-offs of the original Sonic games. They imitated without understanding what worked, and they fell flat because of it. The Bubsy ball in 4D, however, is a good implementation of thievery. Rolling around at the speed of sound is a Sonic trademark, but its physics and weight make it feel more like you’re playing Marbleblast Ultra, though you never get up to Marble Blast’s ludicrous speed. You can pop in and out of ball form at a moment’s notice, giving it some fun utility in keeping your speed up.
The presentation is good. The graphics are nice and colorful, the animations are bouncy. The music is a nice touch. It’s jazzy and upbeat. There’s a bridge level that has a song that reminded me of the soundtrack for Road Trip Adventure on the PS2. It’s solid overall.
Bubsy is back with his quips and jokes, but he only seems to have one or two lines now, which get old real quick, but that’s part of his character, I guess. I thought they’d give him hundreds of lines and have him talking all the time to really play into the ironic enjoyment aspect. He does say “what could PAWSSIBLY go wrong” and references Bubsy 3D. Self-awareness quota paid.
I recommend giving Bubsy 4D a shot, which is something I never thought I’d say. It’s a fun platformer with tight controls and a fun moveset. Each level also has a gold medal speedrun time which requires playing well and getting creative with shortcuts. It’s fun and a purrfect game to cat scratch that platformer itch. Cats.
Klostyn
Klostyn (I don’t know how it’s pronounced) is a first person shooter. It takes its cues from late 90s shooters like Gunman Chronicles, SiN and Quake 2. You run around and shoot space pirates while hitting switches and exploring ancient ruins.
What’s presented in the demo is promising. The movement is quick and responsive, which is good for dodging the enemies’ projectiles. The weapons feel good to fire, with nice recoil animations and chunky soundwork, making each shot impactful. In terms of gameplay, it’s a really strong, solid shooter that perfectly emulates the classics it’s trying to live up to.
This precise imitation extends to the presentation. The graphics are era-appropriate. Low-poly boxy models, medium res textures that repeat and low resolutions. The game plays in 4:3 by default, at 800x600 pixels. It has an optional CRT filter, which looks good, if you want to go for full authenticity. The game boots up into a faux desktop and loads up as an intro sequence, but you can skip it and go straight into the decroded studio intro movies, with their banded colors and dithering.
The sound design is another positive. The guns all sound great. Punchy and authoritative. The ambient sounds give the game a good sense of setting, and all the sci-fi beeps and boops you hear when near machinery or when pressing buttons sounds era-appropriate. Everything is caked in a thing layer of bit-crushing, to really sell the idea that you’re hearing it from a pair of tinny desktop speakers.
It’s a fun, solid shooter with an amazing presentation, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. The level you get to play in the demo is massive, which gives you a lot of time to spend with the game and get a good idea of what it’s like. The level is also relatively easy to navigate, with good signposting and an obvious flow. Overall, a great throwback shooter that I’ll be keeping an eye on when it releases.
Rebel Engine
Rebel Engine is a fast-paced first person spectacle fighter. Use different guns and punches to style on enemies, launch them in the air and blast them to pieces. Mostly launch them in the air. Everything seems to send enemies skyward.
The core gameplay revolves around melee attacking enemies and comboing them. You have guns, but they’re mostly for utility or to set up combos. You can also grab enemies to use as a new gun, or throw them for good damage. You can dash, ground pound and air kick enemies to send them into another zip code.
The core gameplay is fun, but there are a few hiccups and some noticeable jank. The hit detection is a bit weird. Sometimes things that look like they hit miss. There’s some suck to to target, which mitigates this, but instead of zooming to a target when you attack, you sort of do a quick teleport jump to them, which is very disorienting at first. A lot of hits lack impact. Enemies aren’t animated well when taking damage, and the sound, much like in the other games I’ve covered, leaves a lot to be desired when trying to sell an impact.
It’s fast, it’s fun, it’s also kind of hard to keep track of things. Once the screen fills with enemies, and they all start attacking at once, and they all have an audio cue when attacking, it goes into sensory overload, and it becomes a mess.
Still, I think these flaws, while kind of bad, don’t outweigh the good in the combat. Chaining moves is fun and fluent, even if there is a lot of stuff to keep track of. Switching between guns and setting up combos is satisfying, but it could be much, much better with some improvements in the sound department.
I recommend Rebel Engine, with the warning that it’s a bit janky and a bit much.
Jackal
Jackal is a top-down shooter/Improvisational Violence game. You run around levels killing guys who can kill you in one shot. Use a variety of weapons like bats, swords, guns, frying pans, basically anything you can get a hold of to slaughter entire rooms of mafia men. It’s basically Hotline Miami, and that’s a good thing.
The big difference between Hotline Miami and Jackal is the physics engine. In Jackal, you can kick things around and they’ll fly off into enemies and kill them. The main character (I don’t know his name, so I’ll call him John Jackal) can kick doors so hard they explode into fragments which have enough force to send a table flying. This little door destruction fact also means you can’t door camp like in Hotline.
The other big differences are the slide and spells. The slide gives you a quick little burst of mobility, letting you slam into an enemy to disarm them. It has a cooldown, so you can’t spam it. This gives the game a more frantic pace and lets you pull off some cool stunts, like sliding into a chair to send it straight into some thug’s cranium.
The spells come in thanks to the titular Jackal, none other than Anubis, the Egyptian god of death. He hangs around John Jackal like an apparition. He talks to him and helps him with spells, which are single-use powerups. In the demo you have access to Madness and Teleport. Madness makes one target go crazy, causing his buddies to shoot him while he tries to kill them. Teleport is pretty self-explanatory. It lets you teleport to a spot. Good for appearing behind someone and killing them quickly, while saying something like “nothing personal”.
These little gameplay changes add up to make a game with a very familiar core, but with enough little nuances to make it a new experience. It retains the fast, improvisational action of its predecessor, while adding new, useful tools into your arsenal.
Jackal’s levels are a lot like Hotline Miami’s. Small building interiors with lots of cover, doors and stuff to use as impromptu murder weapons. The flow of the game is different, with levels coming one after the other and most of them having more than one wave of enemies to deal with. Some levels start with you in a non-hostile mode, where you can walk around the stage and plan a route, before striking and alerting everyone in the building. This is a really cool feature, but it’s somewhat janky, since you can aggro an enemy by walking too close to them. If you walk to aggressively, the entire building suddenly wants to kill you.
The demo also features a huge, open level at the end. This new environment changes the action significantly, and forces the player to adapt to a new, more dangerous play style. It works, too. It’s a great change of pace and it shows how good the game’s systems are.
The presentation is fantastic, too. Great art style with some good color palettes, a glitzy 70s style look to it with some Vegas touches. The music is awesome, with lots of high-energy, jazzy tunes to keep you in a groovy state of fight or flight. The voice performances are really good, too, and the still cutscenes with text give the game a feel reminiscent to I Am Your Beast, which also has a great presentation. Come to think of it, Your Beast is also one of them Improvisational Violence games.
I highly recommend Jackal. It scratches that Hotline Miami itch really well, delivering a refreshing take on the improv violence subgenre. It’s also pretty dang challenging. Give it a shot. I’m sure it won’t disappoint.
Homura Hime
Homura Hime is a 3D action brawler where you play as a girl fighting evil spirits. You use your swords and a variety of moves to juggle enemies and beat them up. There’s also some light platforming.
The combat is simple, but fun. You have light and heavy attacks, and you can chain them for combos that send enemies flying for air combos and you have three special moves. Each special move is distinct and effective with each having its own use case.
Combat takes place in enclosed arenas against groups of enemies. They are varied and mixed well, putting you up against melee type enemies with flying ranged enemies for support and things like that. There are also big, dangerous mini-boss type enemies that trigger a bullet hell type dodging sequence. The fights get a lot more interesting as more enemies are added.
The presentation is very good. It has a nice cartoony anime look to it, with good colors and cute designs. Everything is animated well and the special effects on the enemies’ attacks are nice and readable.
It’s a solid game overall. It’s not too difficult or complex, but it’s a good time. Once the enemies start attacking at once it gets interesting, and I appreciate the fact that there’s a parry but it’s not game breaking like it is in other games. It’s almost like a perfectly timed dodge that lets you move in a direction of your choice. It’s more for repositioning than for getting a big counter attack that slows down time.
I recommend it if you want a fun hack and slash-type game. It’s also a good counter example to a game coming up on the list. Spoiler alert!
Conjunctivitalizer
Conjunctivitalizer is a terrible name for a game. It’s also a 2D vertical shoot-em-up that claims to “smash the conventions of the shooting genre TO PIECES”. I don’t know what they mean by that, but it’s a decent game.
The game’s main gimmick is that you have a sword that can interact with enemy projectiles. Blue projectiles can be batted away and they turn into bullets. Yellow projectiles are absorbed for laser energy and red projectiles are bad news. They hurt you if you touch them at all, so avoid at all costs. This forms the game’s backbone and main form of scoring.
When you slash blue projectiles with your sword, you shoot out a spread of new bullets. If these bullets kill an enemy, they turn into a flower, which gives you points. The more points you get, the more damage your shots do, and enemies become faster. It’s a scoring and ranking system all in one.
It’s an interesting mechanic. Once you hit the bullets, they fly off to where the sword sent them. If you hit them from the left, they fly right, and if you hit them from the right, they fly left. This little quirk means you have to position yourself before hitting the blue projectiles to aim them and have them hit as many enemies as possible. It’s a lot of fun, and adds a nice layer of challenge.
The game itself is more in line with older shooters. Enemy and bullet density is very low, with fewer but more accurate shots. There are also some traversal sections where you have to avoid terrain.
Its presentation is very nice. It’s a cute-em-up with wacky visuals. It has a more muted color palette that makes it look like a game from the early 90s, and it pulls off the style well. The music is nice, too. It’s catchy and makes for some good listening while you’re dodging shots. The sound effects could use more work. They lack that arcade oomph. They’re not loud or satisfying enough.
Overall, it’s a fun game. I recommend Conjunctivitalizer. I also recommend they change that awful, awful name. I can barely spell it right. I had to triple-check it every time I wrote it and I’m 90% sure it’s still wrong.
Let me know if you ever find out what it means by “smash the conventions of the shooting genre TO PIECES”.
Forestrike
Forestrike is a 2D brawler deckbuilding roguelite. Each fight is like a puzzle, which you solve using your fists. Use the power of the foresight, and replay each battle over and over until you develop a winning strategy. Then execute it for real. It’s like using save states.
It’s a really interesting concept backed up with some solid combat. Your attacks have good reach, they feel useful and they are powerful. You have an arsenal of tools at your disposal, such as dodges, blocks and other fancier tricks like throwing weapons or reflecting projectiles.
Each enemy has their own strategy, with some favoring rushing in, some can block and others dodge. Knowing how to approach each foe and in what order is key to victory.
I remember seeing this game announced a while back and it looked interesting, but I was skeptical of the foresight gimmick. Either you replayed each fight until it was rote memorization, solving each encounter like a puzzle and not a real fight, or you eventually get good at the game and you don’t have to use it ever again.
The mechanic feels alright for now. Only repeated playthroughs can determine if it’s a good idea or just a cheap gimmick. For the time I spent with the demo, it was good. You can replay fights over and over, but the game keeps track of how many times you use the foresight, and it encourages you to keep it low. There are even some fights that disable the power completely and others that give you bonus rewards for not using it more than a few times.
It’s a neat concept with a slick execution. I recommend you give Forestrike a try, and see if you like predicting the future.
The Eh…
Project Chameleon
Project Chameleon is a 2D stealth game where you turn into objects to sneak past guards. The idea is more interesting than the execution. Turning into objects for stealth makes me think of Prop Hunt or PREY, where you turn into a coffee cup to avoid detection, but it’s not like that here. In Project Chameleon, it’s more like a glorified hide button; you turn into the object you’re standing in front of. You can’t copy the item in other places, or copy any item. It’s a bit disappointing in that regard.
The game itself is fine. The early levels are incredibly simple and straightforward, not interesting at all, but they teach you the game’s mechanics. The game gets more complicated as it goes on, adding more mechanics and situations.
There are some guards that spot one type of object. I like to think they’re experts in one thing. For example, one robot looks specifically at lamps and the other at water coolers. If you turn into a lamp and the lamp expert looks at you, you get caught. The challenge comes from timing your morphs so that the enemies can’t detect you. Later on there are machines you can use to swap each guard’s expertise. The levels start to open up into multi step problems that span several floors. It’s more interesting when it gets more difficult, but I think the game might get more and more convoluted instead of more interesting.
I’m ambivalent towards it. It’s an okay premise done well, but I sort of dread seeing what kind of levels come later, where the solution is a ten minute scramble that has you going back and forth between floors like you use the elevators for recreation.
Motorslice
Motorslice is a 3D action platformer/waifu admiration sim. You play as a drone who’s stalking P, a girl who is exploring an abandoned megastructure where sentient construction equipment roams free. You run around the place, do some light platforming and slash at enemies with cool real-time slash deformation.
The overall idea is neat, but it’s a bit diluted for my tastes. It has a lot of platforming sections, but they’re not the kind of Mario/Crash kind where you measure jumps and distances. It’s the more automatic Uncharted kind where you press buttons and the jumps just sort of happen. It’s not quite a quick time event, there is a chance of failure (mostly due to jank), but it’s pretty automatic and low-stakes.
The combat is there. I thought it’d be more of a focus, since it has that cool slash thing where the enemies’ model gets cut in real time with your slashes, like in Metal Gear Rising, but it’s underutilized, at least in the demo. Enemies die in one hit, and so does the protagonist, so there isn’t much combat. You only face two enemies at most at a time. The rest of the experience is spent doing that aforementioned light platforming.
There is obviously a lot of work and passion put into this, but it’s not my cup of tea. It’s plays too much like a Triple-A game. A whole lotta work went into P, and making her as much of a waifu as possible. There are little areas where you can sit and watch her, and the camera has a function where you can ogle her and she blushes. Oh, don’t worry, she’s fully clothed, so it’s safe-horny.
A lot of people seem to get a kick out of this, I’m just not one of them. Check it out if you want to stare uncomfortably at an anime girl- I mean- do some light platforming and basic combat.
Tears of Metal
Tears of Metal is a hack and slash musou game. Musou means it’s like Dynasty Warriors or Hyrule Warriors. Those games where you play as a human lawn mower. This one has a Scottish theme and it’s a roguelite. Daring, aren’t we.
The core gameplay is alright. It’s a musou, so it’s mashy by nature. You’ll be pressing buttons to take down inconsequential chaff. Every now and then there will be a bigger guy who will attack instead of being a walking sandbag. These are few and far between.
The overall gameplay is a mixed bag. It’s a musou, which means it’s mashy and kind of braindead, but the special enemies and bosses actually require a little skill and attention to beat, but there are only a few of them each fight and 99% of the enemies are defenseless nobodies. It’s kind of fun, but a lot of things hold it back for me.
The worst aspects are the roguelite bits. After every fight you pick one of three, and these skills are filled to the brim with nouns. One skill deals bonus Smite when attacking, another spawns orbs. What do the orbs do? Read the tooltip. Do the orbs do more damage than +3% damage on my heavy attack? Probably not. How much does my heavy attack do? Who knows.
Then there are the currencies. There’s enough currencies here to make me think it’s a phone gacha. You have one for upgrading your units, one for your character, one for unlocking characters and more. I don’t even know what they do. I checked out the upgrades and, as I thought, it’s just a bunch of numbers. Plus five percent damage on this thing, plus two percent damage when you’re facing north, plus three fifths damage when you hit an enemy with the second attack in your string and it’s Tuesday and you just ate. You can upgrade everything, there are numbers everywhere, and I don’t care about aaaaany of it.
I don’t know if I can really recommend Tears of Metal. Its’ too mashy and simple for me. Instead of solidifying the main combat to keep things interesting, the game goes for convoluted progression systems that fill a bunch of bars and make number go up. I don’t care if number go up, if I’m just mashing one attack button most of the time. I think most people will enjoy it. It’s just not for me.
There’s also multiplayer if you want to take on hundreds of dudes together with your friends. No pause.
The Bad
Aerial_Knight’s DropShot
DropShot (specifically, the one by Aerial_Knight) is a first person shooter where you’re falling off a plane and have to shoot bad guys and avoid obstacles on your way down. It’s a neat concept, but I don’t think it does much with it.
Each stage starts with you falling from a plane. Instead of feeling like you’re, well, falling out of a plane, it feels more like you’re gently gliding down. There are a few hazards here and there, but they’re not very dangerous, nor are they very threatening. You can dodge them with little effort. You have to shoot enemies, too, and they’re sort of dropping down with you and they don’t put up a fight. They’re more like targets than a real threat or obstacle. The game rewards and encourages replaying levels for better scores.
The presentation is nice. It has a very colorful, distinct style to it. It does that Dead As Disco thing where everything is purple. The menus and UI are nice, too. The audio design isn’t very good. It’s very empty, with just the music going and a few stray sound effects here and there. There isn’t much ambient noise, no wind wooshing as you’d expect while falling through the sky at terminal velocity.
Personally, I didn’t think it was too interesting. The concept of falling out of a plane and shooting dudes sounds fun, but in practice it’s just a shooter on rails. Maybe there is some more stuff in the full game; more enemy types, more mechanics, more challenge, but the core gameplay is bland. I like quick games that need to be replayed for score, but this one didn’t hold my interest for too long. Give it a shot if you’d like.
CAGE ME NOT
Cage Me Not is a top-down brawler/platformer where you can phase through walls. Much like the aforementioned Project Chameleon, it doesn’t do much with its premise. You use the phase ability to go through walls at specific points, and you can phase through enemy attacks, making it a sort of pseudo dodge.
The idea is interesting, but the execution isn’t anything to get excited over. It features incredibly light and easy platforming sections spread over a long level. There are also combat encounters, but they’re against two enemies at most and are over in a few hits. Calling this a brawler is a bit disingenuous.
What little fighting there is is almost fun. You can send enemies flying and they ragdoll away, which is entertaining for a bit. This same ragdolling makes it easy to throw enemies off the stage into a botomless pit, where they just die. Normally this would be great, but the combat encounters are so sparse that chucking one or two enemies every few minutes isn’t very engaging.
I don’t recommend Cage Me Not. Its demo stage is four minutes of content stretched over fifteen minutes. Its action is spread very thin, its combat and platforming are too easy and it doesn’t do much with its interesting premise. Cage Me Not? More like Play Me Not am I right, gamers? Up top!
Eternal Palace Sakura
Have you ever played a game that left you wondering if it’s supposed to have nudity in it? You know, a game that plays like crap but it has a hot main character, so you think “oh, this isn’t supposed to be played for fun, she takes her clothes off at some point and that’s why people pay for this”. Well, that was my experience with Eternal Palace Sakura. Except there’s no nudity. The game is just that bad.
Eternal Palace Sakura is a roguelite (groan) 3D hack and slash where you play as a catgirl thing going around a castle and trying not to die of boredom. Your goal is to climb to the top of a castle and fight a boss. Each room of the castle has an event. Some of them are fights. Some of them give you numbers.
The fighting is boring and simplistic. You slash at enemies with one combo and use a variety of special attacks. Every attack feels clunky and slow, with a lot of uncancelable recovery frames. It’s not weighty and chunky like a souls-like, it’s action combat with slow attacks. They make each attack feel sticky in a bad way.
The worst part about the combat is the dodge. It has a weird tendency to go off in random directions. You can’t really influence where you’ll go when you dodge. Sometimes I press right and it goes forward, or left. I thought it had to do with the directional inputs. Maybe you have to input a direction and then the dodge button. That worked once, then it kept dodging wherever the catgirl saw fit.
The game discourages the use of the dodge button, since spacing doesn’t matter. You’re supposed to block. Blocking fills your special gauge, which you can use to unleash a special attack that hits everything around you. You’re rewarded for staying still and defending. Blocking is very useful since enemies will attack you from offscreen with no real tells.
Most fights can be beaten by mashing the attack buttons haphazardly. It’s about as fun and interactive as getting your wisdom teeth removed.
Like other roguelites, this game offloads any interesting bit into pure number-based convolution. After each fight, you get to pick one of three to make your numbers go up. This one is especially egregious with its numbers and obfuscation. Would you rather have +10% damage on your attacks, or get +5 attack damage? What’s the difference? Why are you asking me? I don’t know.
Every upgrade is as uninteresting as that. Just flat numbers with too many decimal places. I don’t see how adding 6.04% to my shield makes the game any less boring. Maybe if it added 6.04255%, now there we’d have a real riot. Why stop there? Why not 50 decimal places?
While exploring the castle, you get points called “Dream Depth”. Once you accumulate enough of these, bad things happen. Enemies get stronger, they do more damage and such. Basically, they get more numbers. Do you benefit in any way from this? Maybe you get better rewards for facing tougher enemies? No. You don’t. You just take a debuff because the game decided you’ve spent too long in the castle, when you’ve been rushing to the exit on every floor because this game isn’t very fun.
The presentation was what made me think this was a boob game. I have to clarify (not that anyone cares), but I didn’t play this expecting titties. I thought this was a fun weeb hack and slash like Homura Hime, which was fun. Once I started playing it, I realized the gameplay was terrible, which led me to believe it’s a porn game, since those have paper-thin gameplay to justify their place in the Steam Store.
The main character is extremely detailed and well animated. 99% of the development time went to making her look as good as possible. She has that Zenless Zone Zero chinese Gatcha money. Since she has so many polygons and everything else looks like garbage, you’d think the guy who made her used only one hand.
The UI is also proof that all the effort went into the catgirl and nothing else. The UI is beyond rough. It’s hard to read with semi-transparent text boxes and the smallest, most uninteresting sans-seriff font. On top of that each skill description is two paragraphs long, so every time you have to pick one of three things it’s like looking at a stack of medical pamphlets. I don’t know if I’m choosing +3.00537% attack damage or reading the side effects of a new anti-depressant… which I’m going to need after playing this non-nude hentai game.
I don’t recommend Eternal Palace Sakura. Play Homura Hime for this exact game done by someone who values fun.
The Ugly
In this section I usually complain about derivative games or the overabundance of roguelites, but I already did that first one too much and the second one has been covered. I’ll go over a few things, starting with the most obvious one, then on to some more personal gripes.
The first one is the absolute avalanche of AI-generated garbage on display. There are way too many games that use AI art as their cover, and that’s an automatic turn-off for me. If you can’t spend a few minutes putting together a little drawing for your game, I can tell you skimped out on other parts of development. AI art is also a good sign that you’re getting into some low quality possible scam.
At the time of writing this, most of them have been yeeted off in favor of actual games, but in the first day I did manage to see quite a few.
Another weird thing I noticed was all the bad audio mixing. I mentioned it in some of the first impressions, but it was constant. It’s like they forgot to add the bass in most of their sounds. There’s no ambient, either, it’s just the music and maybe one or two sound effects. It got to the point where, if a game had okay sound design, I took note of it and felt like I had to mention it. Maybe there’s a shortage of audio engineers?
Conclusion
That was the Steam Next Fest for October 2025. At least what I played from it. There were some good stuff, some bad stuff, but there was also a lot of underwhelming stuff. Things that I played that were just okay. I wouldn’t buy them, but they’re not bad enough to inspire a rant, like that one Palace Sakura game. Granted, I did avoid a lot of the crappier looking games, so maybe some fun teardowns were filtered out.
The biggest surprise for me was Busby 4D. I had zero expectations for a new Bubsy game, but it’s good. I never thought I’d find a Bubsy game fun again after I used to think the first one on the SNES was good. I was five at the time.
Klostyn was also a great find. I had never heard of the game, but I thoroughly enjoyed the demo. It’s like a long-forgotten shooter from the 90s. A good one, at that. Lots of good ideas and an incredibly authentic presentation. It’s an easy buy for me.
Last but not least, Jackal. I played, and loved, Hotline Miami back in 2012. Wow, it’s already 13 years old. It’s retro. My God I remember playing that game on release and now it’s retro. I feel ancient all of a sudden. It’d be on Good Old Games and no one would complain. Maybe other crusty millennials who are unaware of the passage of time like me. I’m still hip and with it. I YOLO and dab.
Where was I? Ah, right. Jackal. Jackal brought back that same feeling of adrenaline and exhilaration the original Hotline Miami gave me. To be as good as the thing you’re inspired by is a huge achievement. It’s a ton of fun, and the new additions are great. Another easy grab.
I recommend playing tons of demos. That way you can find something new you didn’t even know existed. I don’t recommend writing 6,000 words on them in one day. You could do without that.
Let me know of any other demo I missed in the comments. I’m sure there are dozens. I could spend an entire month playing demos non-stop and still not cover all of them. That’s both a good and bad thing.
VIDEOGAMES
Thanks for this write up because I booted up the Next Fest page right after it released and it just had a ton of AI slop on the front page, and I don't just mean the art. I scrolled over a hundred games and didn't see a single one of the ones you listed here. Also, I've ranted about this before in one of the previous articles comment sections, but roguelikes really need a wrangling, the amount of games resorting to just making everything roguelike is insane. Really devs, roguelike elements can't replace level design.